Re: replacement character

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen redhat com>]

On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 20:42 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le jeudi 12 janvier 2006 �4:06 -0500, Matthias Clasen a �it :
> > On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 22:26 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2006-01-12 at 12:58 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > > I wonder why some fonts have the glyph I would expect there, a question
> > > > mark on some dark background (Fixed), or just a black square (Console),
> > > 
> > > Those are fine.
> > > 
> > > > but most of the text fonts, in particular Bitstream Vera, have something
> > > > that looks similar to a cedilla or comma. Is that a traditional symbol
> > > > used to indicate unknown characters ? I would be much happier to have a
> > > > more questionmarkesque glyph in all fonts...
> > > 
> > > That's weird and very probably a bug or something in Bitstream Vera.
> > > (There is a small chance it's a workaround for some bug somewhere, but
> > > it's clearly not a traditional symbold for unknown characters.)
> > > 
> > > roozbeh
> > > 
> > 
> > Hmm, but the same glyph appears in the Unicode tables...
> 
> That's not weird at all.
> It told you Fedora does not have any variable font providing a clean
> unknown character (most certainly Vera since dejavu had to create the
> glyph, probably all others else there would have been a problem report
> last year)
> 
> What it got is one font lying about this glyph (probably because its
> designer considered no one would ever use it, and put a random squiggle
> in its place).
> 
> For every font you try fontconfig fallbacks till it finds a font file
> that claims to provide the glyph -> every font which is missing this
> glyph (almost all) is fallbacking on the same problem font.
> 
> Install any font which provides the right glyph, putting it on higher
> prio than the b0rked font, and everything will be fine. Including in the
> unicode table applet.

Ah, you are probably right. I somehow thought I had seen it in a gif in
the brower, but it was probably just Vera again ...

Matthias